RICK SANTORUM’S CATHOLICISM AND WEDGE ISSUES: A CONTENT ANALYSIS OF RELIGION COVERAGE IN MAJOR U.S. NEWSPAPERS by ALISON MATAS Dr. Debra Mason, Project Chair Laura Johnston Maggie Walter MAY 2013 ii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like to thank the members of my committee for their advice, encouraging words and excellent copy editing skills. Thank you, especially, to Debra for helping with the tricky aspects of my research and for continually reassuring me I was on the right track. I would also like to thank the Duffy Fund for providing me with financial support, which made it easier for me to live and work in Maryland. Finally, I would like to thank the editorial staff at The Baltimore Sun for welcoming me to the newsroom, trusting me with important work and allowing me to contribute to the high quality newspaper it provides to Marylanders each morning. iii TABLE OF CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS..………………………………………………………….ii LIST OF TABLES……………………………………………………………………iv ABSTRACT…………………………………………………………………………...v Chapter 1. INTRODUCTION………………………………………………………………1 2. WEEKLY FIELD NOTES……………………………………………………...2 3. EVALUATION………………………………………………………………..57 4. ABUNDANT PHYSICAL EVIDENCE………………………………………60 5. ANALYSIS COMPONENT…………………………………………………152 APPENDIX 1. CODEBOOK AND CODE SHEET………………………………………….186 2. ARTICLES CODED…...…………………………………………………….196 3. WRITTEN PERMISSION TO USE COPYRIGHTED MATERIALS……...393 4. PROJECT PROPOSAL……………………………………….......................394 iv LIST OF TABLES Table Page 1. Sentences Containing References to Abortion by Newspaper………………173 2. Sentences Containing References to Homosexuality by Newspaper………..173 3. Sentences Containing References to Evolution by Newspaper……………...174 4. Code Sheet……………………………………………………………………187 RICK SANTORUM’S CATHOLICISM AND WEDGE ISSUES: A CONTENT ANALYSIS OF RELIGION COVERAGE IN MAJOR U.S. NEWSPAPERS Alison Matas Dr. Debra Mason, Project Chair ABSTRACT Little scholarly research has been conducted about how journalists report on religion during a political campaign. Even so, there is evidence to suggest religion plays a major role in voting patterns in an election. Journalists, however, often avoid covering the religious beliefs of political candidates. When they do, they choose to focus on wedge issues, such as abortion, homosexuality, or evolution, to frame their articles. During the 2012 election, Rick Santorum, a candidate for the Republican presidential nomination, talked about his Catholicism frequently and took a hard stance on social issues involved with the campaign. This study used a content analysis to assess journalists’ use of wedge issues to frame news articles and editorials about Santorum’s Catholicism from The New York Times, The Washington Post, and washingtonpost.com from January through March 2012, when Santorum was running in the presidential primaries. There was not enough disparity in results to run nonparametric tests to assess relationships among the collected variables. This research corroborates previous studies showing that journalists usually cover religion on a superficial level and deal with the outcomes of a candidate’s religious beliefs rather than examining the tenets of those beliefs. It also indicates several of the wedge issues most widely used by journalists when reporting on religion might be antiquated and could be updated to include views on the death penalty, torture and contraception. 1 INTRODUCTION I chose to complete my professional project at The Baltimore Sun because I wanted an opportunity to work for a newspaper in a major U.S. city. I had already spent time as a journalist at newspapers that reach small communities and at one that had a statewide reach, but I had never worked in a large metropolis. I also wanted the chance to pursue investigative and data-driven reporting rather than just doing general assignment work, and I knew I would be able to do that at the Sun. My goal is to someday be a journalist at a newspaper or a nonprofit journalism organization on the East Coast where I could work mostly on investigative and computer-assisted reporting projects. Not only is the Sun located on the East Coast, but it is also home to several excellent investigative reporters. By spending a semester at the Sun, I had the chance to learn from these journalists and help them with some of their investigations — in some instances, I was leading the team. Those experiences taught me more about best practices in investigative journalism and, I imagine, will make me more marketable in future job searches. 2 WEEKLY FIELD NOTES Week one: Jan. 21 to 25 Baltimore Sun duties: • I wrote a story with a fellow metro-team reporter about a man who allegedly killed his wife the same day a court let him go on personal recognizance for a previous assault charge. It started out as a daily and turned into an enterprise project that looked at the legal system's failure to protect this woman and advocates’ recommendations for keeping domestic violence victims safe outside the legal system. I made multiple trips to the district courthouse to request and take notes on court files and managed to track down the man's arrest record in Massachusetts. I researched similar domestic violence cases, argued with court commissioners over the phone and interviewed experts. The story ended up running on 2A Friday. • I'm going to be writing a follow-up story about how district court commissioners are trained, using the transcript from a bail review hearing as my launching point. I started some preliminary work for this. • Friday, I spent most of my day at an "intern assignment" covering a polar bear plunge at the Chesapeake Bay. I wrote a feature story that I was told will most likely be the 1A centerpiece in Saturday's paper. My editor/supervisor (Andy) told me he was very pleased with what a good writer I am and said it will make this experience much easier. 3 • I also had a meeting with Andy to talk about his expectations for me and my expectations for my project experience. We agreed that I'm going to function as a full member of his metro reporting team -- especially because he said he's feeling short-handed -- and brainstormed some projects I can work on. I feel good about our working relationship, and I've noticed that he's trying hard to be an advocate for me in the newsroom. Reflection: I think the Baltimore Sun is more of a reporter's newspaper than it is a writer's paper. Andy told me much of the news coverage here is approached as a team effort because it's faster, considering the newsroom is smaller than it used to be. On an average day, he said, about half the stories on the front page will have a double byline. He said he doesn't think much of that because if you've done enough work to earn credit for it, then that's what counts. I'm a person who likes to have control over her work and thinks of an article as my project. Already, I've been challenged to change that view. When I was writing my crime story, I was in a file that both the other reporter and editor were tinkering with, and I was constantly emailing notes from interviews or paragraphs for the story to them so we could include it. I can certainly recognize what I contributed, but it's a different experience. I can see how it works for this newsroom, though, and I'm glad I'm learning how to do this. 4 Research progress: • I finalized my coding sample, which contains about 75 editorial and news articles, equaling more than 150 pages of text. • I pulled a pretest sample to use to test for coding reliability. Because I'd taken all the Washington Post and New York Times articles that had come up in Factivia using my search parameters, I widened it to include all major U.S. publications. I selected four news articles and four editorials, which is about 15 pages of text and 10 percent of the size of my primary sample. • I coded the eight pretest articles, and now I'm going to wait a week before coding them again to check for reliability. 5 Week two: Jan. 28 to Feb. 1 Baltimore Sun duties: • I attended a press conference and gathered charging documents from police and then wrote a story about two men who allegedly stole 29 handguns from a store in Pennsylvania and then drove to Baltimore to sell them on the streets. Maryland's governor actually tweeted my article the next day. • I wrote an article about sporting goods stores that might reopen after the Super Bowl if the Ravens win (kind of like a Black Friday thing). It got combined with another Super Bowl article, and I ended up getting a 1A byline out of it in both the Maryland and special Louisiana edition of the newspaper. • I attended an event that was part of the city's 10-year campaign to end homelessness by 2018. The city is halfway through its efforts to do this, so the article also looked at what has actually been accomplished and raised some criticisms of the project, too. I wrote an article for print/online. • I spent hours weeding through Excel documents of workers' compensation information provided to the newspaper from seven counties and Baltimore. (My computer-assisted reporting skills are really coming in handy.) I'm pulling out information to create new spreadsheets for a four-part project with the newspaper's city government reporter. I'm finding the most ridiculous claims and the most serious claims, looking at claims that relate to violence at schools, and comparing claims among counties. 6 • I continued working on the follow-up to my previous story about domestic violence. Mostly, I transcribed court recordings that I'd requested and worked with a local shelter to find a former victim of domestic abuse whom I’m going to interview next week.